Photo by: David Stewart
After 101 days of banishment from campus, Korbel School of International Studies professor Arthur Gilbert has been permitted to teach DU graduate students again.
Gilbert, who holds tenure distinction, is currently teaching “Genocide and the Human Condition” at the graduate level.
“I just want to get back to my life’s work,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert links the stress from this trial process with his dramatic weight loss and associative health problems over the summer.
Gilbert is fighting the charge through an appeals process against the university’s Human Resources department regarding allegations by two female students about controversial subject matter in Gilbert’s graduate class “The Domestic and International Consequences of the Drug War.”
According to information obtained from the course syllabus, plus another graduate student who was in the class, the subject matter connected masturbation, insanity and the ideology of sexual repression. Gilbert’s discussion of masturbation and the concept of sin is what made the two female students uncomfortable, according to the student.
“You can only learn by being uncomfortable,” said Gilbert, referring to extending one’s learning experience beyond his comfort level.
Attempts to contact Christopher Hill, the dean of the Korbel School of International Studies, were not successful.
Gilbert has chronicled his experience by writing an article detailing his experience with the Human Resources Department, Dean Hill and the current appeals process. The subtitle of the as-yet-unpublished work is “An Academic Horror Story”; the title was not released.
During Gilbert’s paid leave of absence, which was instituted on April 6, 2011, the professor was banished from the DU campus. He was also forbidden from interacting with both undergraduate and graduate students.
Despite returning to campus, Gilbert is not permitted to teach or interact with undergraduate students for the remainder of his tenure at the University of Denver.
“Academia isn’t like other fields,” said Gilbert. “We have to be given the freedom to teach in the best way we know how.”
When Gilbert was removed from his teaching position in April, his undergraduate course was canceled. The teacher’s aids for the class were left without work and a subsequent source of work-study income.
Dean Hill assumed teaching Gilbert’s graduate-level course in the spring of 2011.
Gilbert had taught at the University of Denver for 50 years prior to banishment. His distinguished students have included such prominent DU alumni as Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Kwan and George W. Casey, Jr., former Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
